


come to your senses (defenses inside)

by nubbins_for_all



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Reunions, Senses, work with me here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-17
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 02:23:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6885334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nubbins_for_all/pseuds/nubbins_for_all
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coming back together is an act of many moving parts. The process of reunion for Jake and Amy, as expressed through each of the physical senses. </p><p>(Set post-season 3, so will most certainly be Jossed. Rating may increase with chapters.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hearing

**Author's Note:**

> Well, it appears I cannot stop. Gosh darn these 99 children and my inability to leave them alone! I suppose I'll just have to wallow in angst and fluff and feelings forever! How *sad*.

She hears him before she sees him. Beneath the squawk of dispatch radios and the crunch of asphalt under tires, his voice comes through. He’s hoarse and the tremor in his upper register is plain as day, but it’s him. Not his answering machine, not a video on her phone, not a three a.m. memory in bed.

Jake.

Amy follows the sound of him. She leaves the Coral Palms Police Chief and Terry mid-sentence, her notebook stuffed haphazardly into her pocket as she pushes through a sea of cops and forensic techs. The parking lot of the Circle K drugstore is practically steaming in the humid Florida heat, crime-scene lights illuminating the vapor that swirls around two sheet-covered bodies and four cuffed mooks—the remains of Jimmy Figgis’ crew. Figgis himself is already en route to an FBI holding cell, his wrists chafing against the cuffs that Amy purposefully cinched too tight. But screw Figgis, she’s already forgotten him, Amy has one mission right now and that’s to go after the first piece of Jake that has been new and present since he left, since last spring, eleven months and three weeks and too long ago.

His voice finally leads her to him, standing by an ambulance and answering questions from a paramedic. He’s wearing a CPPD shirt and baggy canvas shorts with nautilus shells on them, which doesn’t surprise her; from what she understands, he and Holt had been stripped down and chained to a radiator in a back room of Figgis’ drugstore hideout. His lower arms are bare, and she can see bruises dotting his wrists and forearms. An ace bandage wraps around his ankle, nestled just above a too-large purple Croc. His face is similarly abused: split lip, black eye, a nasty scrape by his jaw.

But it’s Jake. And he’s whining.

“I told you, I’m fine—look, you want me to jump on one foot and do the backwards alphabet? I gonna skip G and Q, I always skip G and Q—no, _you_ sit down, I feel fine, now where’s Captain Holt and where the hell-ass is Amy Santi-OOF!”

If Amy were thinking clearly, which she’s not, she would have realized that her boyfriend has just undergone sixteen hours of torture and he might still be a little tender, but she doesn’t think clearly, she doesn’t think at all, one minute she’s standing there listening to him bitch at the paramedic and the next she’s colliding with him at top speed.

Jake staggers backwards when she slams into him, and for a second Amy panics, but just as the idea of falling and crushing him at the moment of reunion enters her frazzled brain, he’s upright again and his arms are around her. Amy winds her fingers into his hair and squeezes him as tightly as she can, not even caring that her flak jacket is really getting in the way of this emotional hug. She feels his lips, chapped and rough with dried blood, press against her neck, and every frozen joint inside of her slowly melts into motion.

“Miss me?” he whispers; she snorts into his shoulder. Amy pulls back and smiles at him, tears in her eyes. He’s all banged up, his face looks a little different—fatter? thinner? what?—but it’s _him._ The dorky grin, the big nose, the warmest eyes on earth. She closes her eyes, leans her forehead against his, and breathes him in.

“Hey, Jake,” she says.

Then she hears him break down.

It’s an ugly, embarrassing sound. Jake likes to make gross noises, he’s the king of farts and fake-vomiting and all emissions immature, but this—this is awful. He’s wrapped around her suddenly, grabbing and clinging to the Velcro of her flak jacket because that’s all he can find, and his face is in her neck, practically under her chin, while he makes these broken wailing noises that start low, rise like a siren, break somewhere along the way and kind of taper off into moans. His legs are wobbly, knees banging against Amy’s as he sags towards her. Jake is in pieces.

Amy has no idea what to do. This is a Jake she has never seen, ever: not after Sophia dumped him, not after his father showed up at his birthday dinner, not after they got the news about the Witness Protection Program in the first place. If Jake ever loses it, even a little bit, he does it in private, in the shower or the bedroom, and usually he just punches something soft and maybe cries a little and then falls asleep with his face in her stomach.

But what’s happening now is totally public and totally out of control, and Jake won’t stop making those sounds, the ones that pierce through Amy like bullets, the sounds of the man she loves in agony. Over his shoulder she sees Rosa and Charles staring, Charles’ mouth hanging open and Rosa’s hands curled into fists. Anonymous Coral Palms police are turning their way; one of Figgis’ mooks looks up and spits on the ground.

Her instincts take over. She shuts down her peripheral vision, crowding out the curious faces around them and the murmurs of concern; instead, she focuses everything on Jake. Her arms pull him to her as tightly as they can. Her lips are in his hair and against his ear and on his neck, saying things like “I’m here” and “It’s over” and “Hey hey hey hey”. She stands up straight, taking his weight, letting him know he can lean on her.

And he does. And he cries. And slowly, eventually, he quiets down. His breathing is heavy but regular. His hands are flat on her back. His hot, sweaty forehead stays pressed against the curve of her shoulder.

“Never see you again,” he whimpers. “I was gonna die and never see you again. Amy. _Amy…”_

Amy keeps her grip tight. “Yeah, well, I’m right here, Jake. I got you.”

“Yeah…” he answers shakily. “Just don’t…don’t…don’t die, okay? Don’t ever die.”

She rubs his back and Jake takes a long, shaky breath. Amy closes her eyes and remembers eleven months and three weeks of this feeling.

“I won’t if you won’t.”

“Deal.”


	2. Seeing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You wanted Kevin/Holt, I give you Kevin/Holt. AND I HAD TO RIP MY HEART OUT TO DO IT, SO WHATEVER GUYS.
> 
> There's smex a-comin', btw. Just preparing yall.

She’s different.

He looks at her and there are a million little things that are just… _off._ Her hair, for one: well, that’s not “little,” she’s chopped almost all of it off and now it frames her face in soft black curls, including one perfect ringlet that goes right down the back of her neck and is just begging him to wrap his finger around it and give a gentle tug. Which he does, as soon as he can, his palm on the nape of her neck and his index finger twisted up in a slick black cowlick.

Amy likes it. She grins at him, and her smile is different too. He’s not sure how, exactly, but he can’t decide if the issue is faulty memory on his part or evolution on hers.

Either way, she’s different.

Jake can’t stop looking at her. From the moment he finally manages to peel himself off her at the parking lot, through the car ride, long hours at Coral Palms County Hospital, the equally long FBI debriefing, to the final drive home—or not home, back to his safehouse, the empty box that he’ll never have to see again after tomorrow—it’s all he can do to focus on anything but Amy.

The new ridges of muscle in her upper arms, the way they move under the skin when she removes the flak jacket and windbreaker and she’s left in only a t-shirt—

The way her nostrils flare as she listens to an CP officer describe how Figgis snatched Jake and Holt from their respective work sites, and the way she cracks her knuckles one at a time, methodically, with none of her old nervous energy—

The way she holds herself, her shoulders slumped just the tiniest bit, when before her posture was always straight as an arrow and now she looks like she’s been carrying the weight of the world and it’s finally gotten to her—

A million little things. And if he didn’t know her so well, it might just be the hair he noticed.

Lucky for him, she's just as stuck on him as he is on her. Her eyes are always there, and at least they seem to be the same: dark, warm, wet with tears sometimes, the Amy-eyes he’s seen in his dreams for almost a year. When she catches him watching her, she smiles, and those eyes tilt a little, soften at the corners, they swallow him up and Jake is home again.

(Once or twice he wonders, does he look different too? He must. He couldn't feel more different.)

By now it’s after midnight. Jake is exhausted and every part of his body is starting to ache, but Amy’s neck is warm under his hand and her hair is wrapped around his finger and he’s not ready to stop looking at her yet. They’re at his house—his ex-house—standing on the lawn together, waiting for the local cops to finish sweeping the premises for any lingering booby-traps or bugs left by Figgis’ men.

“So what’s the next step?” he asks, too sleepy to really process the answer but too wired to stay silent. Amy sighs and pinches the bridge of her nose.

“I mean, getting you two back to New York is a priority, obviously, but also putting the case together…I know they’re going to want to keep you here a few days.” Her jaw is tight on those words.

“Hey, as long as you’re here…” His fingers press against her spine.

“Oh, come on. You and Holt really want to stay in Florida one second longer than you have to?” she asks dubiously, a smile flitting across her face. Jake glances towards Holt, who stands a few feet away, wearing a white t-shirt and the pants from a pair of hospital scrubs. He’s barely said anything since their rescue. Still and silent now, he seems to be blending into the Florida night.

“Well, maybe not,” he admits. Amy bites her lip, her eyes following his towards Holt. It had been her operation to coordinate, and she had taken Figgis out herself, so she wasn’t there when they were found in that stifling room, manacled with bike locks to a rusty radiator. Jake knows that deep down, Amy is glad she wasn’t the one to free them from their captors, is glad she didn’t have to see her boyfriend and her mentor chained up like dogs. He doesn’t blame her: of everything he went through in that place, seeing Captain Holt spitting blood and hearing his cries of pain might have been the worst.

Suddenly, as though Jake’s memory has somehow burst through his skull and into the night air, a shout rents the quiet around them. It appears to have come from the window of an approaching police cruiser, which now parks at the edge of Holt’s beautifully-manicured lawn (Jake’s turned brown and scraggly a long time ago), and out of the back seat comes Kevin, his hair sticking in clumps to his sweaty forehead, his face pale, wet patches dotting the fabric of his Oxford shirt.

“ _Raymond.”_ He doesn’t shout it this time, he just says it, quietly but with enough intensity to split the earth, and then he’s moving towards Holt, whose stoic face doesn’t change one bit as he turns and makes a beeline for his husband.

Kevin’s loafers slip on the dewy grass and he pitches forward, falling to one knee as he grabs a handful of grass to keep from going all the way down, but even as he rights himself Holt is there and he reaches out, he grabs Kevin around the middle and yanks him to his feet, and then the two of them are embracing—not hugging, not kissing, just _embracing_ in the fullest sense of the word. One of Kevin’s arms is around Holt’s shoulders, grabbing a handful of his t-shirt, and the one is low on his waist, pulling torso to torso with everything he’s got; Holt has Kevin’s head cradled in his hand, his free arm wrapped all the way around Kevin’s chest, his fingers slotted in to ribs and his thumb rubbing slowly back and forth.

Jake’s mouth is dry. His hand is clammy on Amy’s neck, and for the first time since he lost it with Amy in the parking lot, he feels like crying. From more than ten feet away, he can see Holt’s shoulders shaking. He can see Kevin placing small, gentle kisses on Holt’s cheek. He can see the grass stain on Kevin’s knee, and he can see a red blotch on Holt’s back where one of his wounds has started to bleed again.

“Oh my God,” he hears, and he turns to see Amy looking at him, her eyes wide now, her mouth slightly open. She puts her palms on his cheeks. Her hands are also sweaty, but warm.

“What?”

“I just…I love you. _So much,”_ she says.

She looks the same when she says that. She looks exactly like Amy, and he feels exactly like Jake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference, Melissa Fumero with short hair (on One Life To Live, my God woman):  
> http://kingoftheflatscreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/melissa-fumero-in-bikini-top-photo-u1.jpg


	3. Smelling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm just writing a bunch right because this week, it has been all of the stress. WATCH ME COPE BY WRITING FIC INSTEAD OF WORKING ON MY ACTUAL PROJECTS.
> 
> (Not that I don't love fic, it's just that I don't get PAID for it. More's the pity.)
> 
> Also, you guys are the sweetest people ever, and your reviews mean the world to me. Thank you so much, I hope you continue to enjoy :)

His old apartment smells bad.

Most of Brooklyn smells bad, honestly, but when a grad student who likes to party and has a dedicated interest in marijuana has been subletting an apartment for eleven months, it goes from bad to _bad._

“Aw, _maaaaaaan_ ,” Jake groans. He kicks an empty pizza box across the floor, scattering crumbs everywhere. “Are you kidding me?! He trashed the place!”

Amy would agree, but she’s not sure if she can risk taking a breath to speak. The mingled stenches of stale beer, bong water, body odor, rotten food, and potent weed are almost overpowering. Most of Jake’s furniture and belongings were left behind when he was shipped down to Florida—standard protocol—and it’s pretty tough to see the number that has been done on this apartment. Stains on the walls, the corpses of squashed water bugs ground into the carpet, splintered chair legs and a rip in the precious mattress…Amy feels like someone has personally trashed the memories that she and Jake shared in this place, all the way back to their first date.

“Look at this!” Jake is riffling through cabinets and drawers, brushing aside empty food containers and waterstained copies of _Time Out_. “Mold…broken glass…oh crap, is that literally--crap? This guy is the worst! Amy, what can we arrest him for? I’m serious, he deserves only pain.”

“Technically, we can’t arrest him for anything,” she says, taking great care not to inhale through her nose. “He was legally subletting from Gina.”

“Oh yeah? Then where was she? Some landlord!” He starts stomping on an empty carton of mango juice. Amy opens her mouth, then closes it; she knows Jake has only seen Gina briefly since he came back, a short reunion at the airport before he was whisked off to yet another FBI debriefing, and she doesn’t think it’s her place to tell him how Gina has spent eleven months avoiding his old apartment—and any mention of his indefinite absence from Brooklyn—with a vengeance.

“Come on,” she says soothingly, walking up behind him and letting her hands coast down his shoulders. He shakes her off absently, staring down at the squashed juice carton as though it too has wronged him. “Let’s grab the thing and go back to my place.”

“But—but—”

“Please, Jake, it smells like death and undergrad in here.”

Jake snorts and turns to her, an eyebrow raised. “You’re a homicide detective, Amy, for shame.”

“Har har har, let’s _go.”_

Ten minutes later, Jake has collected the grey metal toolbox from the back of the bathroom closet (he won’t tell Amy what’s in it) and they’re downstairs in her car, all the windows open and AC blasting away the various odors.

“You’re so not allowed to ever criticize my hygiene again,” Jake says, drumming his fingers against the metal box in his lap. Amy rolls her eyes and steers them towards her apartment, which is thankfully just as pristine as it ever was.

“First of all, I’m very much allowed to criticize you for the rest of our natural lives, and second, that guy didn’t even _have_ hygiene. He was one of those terrible humans who can live contently in filth. I mean, you can be gross, like _gross_ , like the time you left those orange peels in your gym shoes—”

“They smelled good!”

“They _grew mold!”_

“Which still smelled better than the shoes!”

“Jesus Christ,” Amy shudders. “The point is, you make messes, you don’t inhabit them.”

“Aw, Ames.” He takes her hand and smiles. “That’s one of the sweetest things you’ve ever said to me.”

“Shut up,” she growls, and yanks her hand away. A second later, she lets it settle back on his thigh, savoring the heat of him through his jeans. Jake leans back against the seat and watches Brooklyn go by.

“This city, right?” he says softly. Amy squeezes his knee.

The rest of the drive to her apartment is pretty quiet: Jake looks like he’s having a lot of feelings about seeing Brooklyn again, and Amy just wants to get home and as far away from that terrible mess as possible, so by the time they park, grab Jake’s suitcase from the trunk, and get through the door into her place, they’ve barely exchanged another five words.

As Amy sets down the suitcase in the front hall, she notices Jake take a long, deep breath in through his nose and close his eyes. He holds it for a moment, then lets it out, a smile spreading across his face.

“What? Why are you sniffing my apartment?” she demands, hands on hips. Jake sets the metal box down on the floor and takes off his own coat, still grinning.

“Um, because it smells _so much better_ than what used to be my apartment. It’s just like I remember.”

“Yeah? What do you remember?”

“Oh, you know…” He shrugs, kicking off his shoes as he heads toward the kitchen to help himself to a glass of water. “Kinda like Lemon Pledge and Indian food and the weird plastic-y smell from your home-laminator …except…wait…”

He pauses, suddenly frowning. His head tilts back and forth, his nostrils flaring, and just as Amy is about to ask him what kind of weird radioactive bloodhound he got bitten by in Florida, their eyes both fall on the same thing—

An ashtray, half-full, sitting on the windowsill.

Jake’s mouth falls open. Amy can feel the deep-red blush starting to creep up her cheeks, and she has the sudden wild urge to grab the ashtray and fling it out into the street, except that’s not gonna do anything but make her seem crazy, and she’s already acted crazy in front of Jake multiple times, and he’s already seen the ashtray, so all in all it’s redundant and she’s screwed.

“Amy. _Santiago.”_ He’s grinning now, and she hates him.

“Shut up,” she stammers, but he’s advancing on her slowly, glass of water forgotten on the counter.

“Amy ‘Shame Cigarette’ Santiago…”

“I was stressed, okay? My boyfriend’s been in Witness Protection in Florida for a year, along with my captain, and I’ve been tracking the man who’s trying to murder them, that’s _stressful!”_   She’s getting a little screechy, but she’s embarrassed. Jake worked hard to help her stop smoking, buying her nicotine gum every time he bought Juicy Fruit for himself and staying patient through her grumpy cravings. To be caught back at it now makes her feel the same way she felt when her mother made _tres leches_ and found her and three of her brothers scooping heavy cream out of the mixing bowls with their fingers.

“Hey, I don’t blame you. I’m a tough guy to miss,” he smirks. Amy mimes vomiting, and he’s almost right there next to her, but she retreats, heading over to the windowsill and snatching up the ashtray. She empties it into the trash can, head down, banging it extra-hard against the side. This is the first time he’s teased her since the raid on Figgis in Florida, the first time they’ve been at home and in private and it’s just been the Jake-and-Amy routine. Self-consciousness is setting in against her will, because she just wants to go right back to being what they used to be, Jake-and-Amy, but it’s been _eleven months_ , and she smokes again and he’s got a weird mystery box and her hair is short and he’s probably learned to fly-fish or something and they don’t know each other in the same absolute way anymore.

Amy sets the ashtray down on an end table and looks back at Jake just as he settles himself onto the couch, sighing in relief when the weight leaves his feet. She removes her own shoes and slides them into the shoe rack—his are flung by the door, they’re always flung by the door—before padding over and sitting beside him. He slides an arm around her shoulders and pulls her in, nose in her hair, lips brushing over her ear. Amy shivers.

“I get it, y’know,” he mutters, and she pulls away slightly to look at him. He’s got the shifty eyes, darting across the floor, but his arm is solid behind her. “After a couple months, I wasn’t doing so hot. I didn’t even have police work to keep me busy.” She can’t help but catch the bitter note in his voice.

“I can’t imagine you smoking, Mr. Cough Like A Bitch,” Amy teases. Jake looks up, surprised, and when he sees that she’s smiling he smiles back.

“I told you, my lungs are delicate.”

“Like a baby bird’s.”

“Like a—shut up.” He’s playing with the curl at the back of her neck now. She cannot find the words to express how much she loves when he does that. (Did she subconsciously get that haircut in the hopes that he would come home and touch the back of her neck? Or was it really to save time on hair care? Amy is a mystery to herself.)

“I don’t even smoke that much,” she insists. “It’s like, a pack a month. I was just pushing so hard at the case, and the closer I got, the harder it was to relax, and—”

“Ames, it’s okay,” Jake cuts her off. He smiles ruefully. “To be honest, I couldn’t judge if it was a pack a week. I…” He swallows, suddenly looking very uncomfortable. “I, um, I did some drinking. To cope.” He pauses. “Beer, mostly. Also, Evan Williams? Is terrible, but I just, I dunno, I did a lot of drinking, during the day and stuff. For a few months.”

“Okay.” Her hand is on his chest, rubbing gently. Jake swallows and tries, fails, tries again to meet her gaze.

“I know it’s not—I know it sounds bad, but Holt took care of me, he really did, he kept it from going too far and got me help.”

“Okay.”

“I’m fine now. I don’t drink right now, I mean I may again, who knows, but I just wanted you to know, I wanted to be totally upfront with you, and if you’re not comfortable with this, you should just tell me right now, please, just be honest and we can take a break or you can have some space because I would understand if you don’t _want_ to have think about that shit, Jesus Christ, I’m sorry to spring this on you, I’ve just been feeling so fucking stupid for _months_ and—”

He can’t talk after that, because his face is smushed into her shoulder and she won’t unwind her arms from around his neck long enough for him to speak.

Amy isn’t surprised. Many cops drink, especially after trauma. Jake has been through as much as anyone, and he doesn’t really have that many vices (other than pushing people away), then suddenly he’s forbidden to contact his loved ones, all on his own in Florida—no, not on his own, stuck with a father figure whom he both desperately wants to impress and around whom he doesn’t want to show weakness, is it any wonder that he looked for comfort in a glass of something strong?

She remembers that he used to drink more after he came back from the Ianucci bust. She didn’t like it then, and she doesn’t like it now. But she doesn’t blame him. She loves him. She wants to ease the pain, not make him call weak just for feeling it.

Eventually she sits back, her hands sliding around to cup his face. Jake gives her a wobbly smile. “So you don’t hate me?”

“I do not,” she replies, and kisses him.

His lips are warm, and the way they move beneath hers is overwhelmingly, bone-achingly familiar. She can still feel the line where a punch split the skin, but it’s almost healed now, and the way Jake deepens the kiss after only a few seconds reassures Amy that he’s not even in a little bit of pain. His fingers slide up into her hair, contouring to the back of her head and pulling her _hard_ up against him as he pants and sucks at her lower lip.

“This _haircut_ ,” he growls. Amy giggles before she can stop herself.

“So you’re a fan.”

“Am I ever. I mean, I loved your old hair, obviously, but this is like… _different_.” He accentuates the statement with another kiss, and then his mouth is moving across her cheek to her ear, hot breath raising goosebumps, and he’s kissing open-mouthed up and down her neck, worrying the skin with his teeth, pushing and swirling the tip of his tongue against areas that were once obscured beneath a curtain of hair, and Amy’s squirming in her seat before she knows what’s happening.

“Mmmm,” he hums, sending a whole new shudder through her. “You definitely don’t smell like cigarettes…”

“Oh, be quiet,” she gasps as he nibbles at a familiar tender spot below her earlobe. “You…you don’t smell the same at all, you’re using… _oh_ , oh God, Jake…I mean, you’re using a new deodorant.”

“Good catch.” Jake chuckles and lifts his head, kissing her so deeply that Amy has to grab onto his shirt to keep the room from spinning. When he pulls back, he’s grinning in that classic I-need-to-be-smacked way. “Old Spice isn’t really strong enough for Florida.”

“I thought it was supposed to be strong enough for anything.”

“You haven’t caught a whiff of my pits at noontime on the panhandle, baby,” he whispers, and then somehow manages to follow that incredibly unsexy statement up with the most erotic thing Amy has ever seen in her life: using only his teeth, he perfectly unbuttons her shirt.

The noise she makes when she realizes what he’s done is only a little quieter than the noise she makes when he goes back to kissing her neck, except this time with some over-the-bra action thrown in.

“Jake— _ah…_ are you…I…if…I mean do you wanna talk more ‘cause we can…”

“No more talking,” he says, his voice low. “I’ve talked to the FBI—” His mouth is under her jaw, so close that every word brushes maddeningly across a maze of nerves. “I’ve talked to the Gang Unit—” Two strong hands are moving her backwards, laying her out on the couch. Her bra is undone, when did her bra get undone? “I’ve talked to everyone in the world and their commanding officer.” He’s on top of her, one knee on either side of her thighs, his eyes bright and his chest heaving. “I’m done talking for a while.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check out the Terry Crews 'Old Spice' commercials. And all the other 'Old Spice' commercials. It's a great way to lose an hour of your life.


	4. Touching

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did you guys think I wouldn't write smut? I mean, did you really think it?
> 
> That being said, this chapter is...kind of only smut. It is only made of sex and a little bit of feelings.

Jake is trembling.

At first he doesn’t know why. Nerves—yes, he’s nervous, he hasn’t touched Amy (or anyone) like this in almost a year, but far more than being nervous he’s simply relieved to be near her at all, to be alive and capable of touching and feeling and doing all that fun stuff. Fear—same as the nerves, if he wasn’t shaking like this when a mook was smashing the butt of a .38 against the back of his head and growling something about putting a bullet in his kneecap, he certainly shouldn’t be scared now. Cold—

Well, maybe it’s a little crisp in that apartment. Amy likes the AC on lower than he does, especially after he’s been living a couple thousand miles closer to the Equator.

But as Amy’s hands slide up underneath his shirt and another tremor shudders through him, Jake has to admit that this weird shaking has to be from more than just a little chill. And who’s he kidding, he’s not cold: on the contrary, his skin feels like it’s on fire, his eyes sting with sweat, and even as he trembles so hard that his teeth click against Amy’s, the heat burns steadily from the inside out.

Every time he or Amy tries to move their little endeavor from the couch to somewhere more comfortable—say, the bed—the other one of them protests, whines, grabs and flails and pull them both back down. It’s not that they don’t want more room, it’s that the urge to stay glued together is stronger than the need to stretch out a little, and the thought of separating, of unclenching and unwinding, has no place in their fevered states of mind.

They’re both soaked with sweat, panting hoarsely, Amy’s hair a mess of wet black curls and Jake’s plastered against his forehead. Amy is naked from the waist up, her shirt thrown onto the coffee table and her bra stuffed halfway between two couch cushions; although her pants are open and Jake’s hand keeps moving restlessly over and sometimes into her underwear, there’s never enough leverage for her to actually get anything off. Lying on top of her, pressing her down into the couch like he’s trying to perform molecular fusion, Jake still has both arms through his sleeves of his shirt, though all the buttons have been popped off, and his pants are shoved down to his ankles. Amy’s breasts and neck are dotted with purple bruises and bitemarks, while Jake’s got thick red marks made by Amy’s fingernails running up and down the length of his back. It’s been close to an hour since they started kissing and haven’t stopped—not that they have any sense of time or space or the rest of the world.

And Jake can’t stop trembling.

“Jake…” Amy gasps, ragged, her voice coming thick through swollen lips. Rather than disconnect from her for even a moment, Jake dives back down, sucking at her neck even as he shakes harder, biting and licking his way down her collarbone and then concentrating everything he has on her right breast. Amy whimpers as he rolls the nipple in his chattering teeth, palming her left breast roughly with his other hand. She’s gripping his ass with both hands, yanking his groin into hers as she rocks upwards, one leg bent and the other coiled over his hips. “Jake…what— _ah—_ what’s wrong…”

“Nnnn,” he replies, and switches sides. He’s been hard for so long now that it’s making him lightheaded and dizzy, and his lower back aches from long periods of involuntary rutting against Amy’s leg; his tongue on her nipple and his hand squeezing just right, he drives right up against her hip and a spiky bolt of pleasure shoots through him. Jake moans into her breast, and then, like an aftershock, the shakes come back even harder, and he has to hold on tight while they toss him back and forth like a ship on stormy seas.

“Jake!” Her hands leave his ass and suddenly they’re hooked under his armpits, pulling him up, forcing him to look her in the eye. Her pupils are blown wide, she’s bright red, sweaty, dazed with arousal—but her brow is furrowed, concerned. “What is it?”

“W-w-w-what d-y-y-y-ou mean-n-n-n?” he manages. Amy frowns and strokes his hair, her other hand pressed hot and firm against his cheek.

“You’re shaking, you’re really…do you need some water? Should I call someone?”

“N-n-no! N-n-n-n-n-n-no,” he hisses. Eyes jammed shut, he tries and fails to grow still; it feels like his heart is being pumped with jet fuel through an exterior line, racing faster and faster beyond his control. His fingers are twitching. His stomach heaves. The panic is setting in.

“Jake, shhhhh… just be calm,” Amy says. Both of her hands come back to the sides of his face. “Look at me.”

“I c-c-c-c-c-c-can’t—”

“Slow, slow…”

Jake’s eyes open the tiniest bit. He focuses on Amy’s face: on her eyes, on her mouth, on the unique and familiar shape of her nose. He feels a warm puff of hair as she slowly exhales onto his chin.

“Breathe with me, Jake. Just breathe in—” She inhales slowly and deliberately. “—And out,” another rush of air.

He almost doesn’t make it. That jet fuel is still coming, and for a minute he honestly thinks he might explode or die or just barf on Amy. But he forces himself to follow her breath, clutching at her ribs and her hips and her shoulders, and with every slow inhale and exhale, there’s a minute decrease in the speed at which his heart is beating and the violence with which his body moves, and in a few minutes (though it feels like hours), he’s lying with his head on her chest, limp and exhausted, clammy and achy but no longer trembling.

“Jesus Christ…what was that?” he murmurs, trailing his fingers up and down the sensitive skin of her inner arm. Amy scratches his head gently.

“I mean, I don’t know if…” She trails off. He frowns and nudges her with his knee.

“What? Don’t know if what?”

“I’ve just seen that a couple times before.”

“Seen what?”

Adrenaline runoff.”

“I left Florida more than twenty-four hours ago, I’m all out of adrenaline.”

“Doesn’t work exactly like that,” she says. The steady _thump-thump_ of her heart, the warmth of her skin, the gentle way she kneads the back of his neck…it’s all putting Jake to sleep pretty quickly. “You’ve definitely _seen_ it before. After a shooting or an explosion or a—trauma…I mean, it doesn’t have to hit right away. It can even be a couple days later. Delayed reaction. Your body is having a panic attack after the fact.”

“Well, great,” says Jake grumpily. “I’m so glad to be having to deal with that right now.” It’s not fair, he wants her, he’s wanted her for months and months, and yet right now he can barely keep his eyes open.

“I know,” Amy whispers, “but I think it’s a good thing. It means you’re working through stuff.”

“Don’t wanna work through stuff…wanna…boink…” Jake pouts against her sternum. Amy snorts.

“Yeah, well, me too, but maybe after you stop twitching like that time you stuck a pen into an outlet.”

The swell of her breast is pushing into his chin. Even as they both grow colder and stickier, she still crosses her arms across his shoulders to snuggle closer.

“I know it’s hard, Jake.” Her voice is soft and warm against his ear. “I’m gonna be right here, no matter what happens. Just let it all out.”

He’s deep down in love and getting deeper every moment.

 She shifts underneath him. Jake realizes that, dopey as he is, this may not be the most comfortable way for him to fall asleep with Amy.

“Mrrghmmph…leggo bed,” he mumbles, sliding slowly off of her like a large Jewish slug. Amy smiles ruefully and hooks his arm over her shoulders, hoisting him to his feet; he’s about to pull away and say something classy about not needing any help and being a big boy who can hold his own wee-wee and everything, but his knees are suddenly about to give out beneath him and he thinks it might be wise to let Amy take the lead here. He trips over the pants still wrapped around his ankles; swearing, he shuffles along, kicking his way out of them like a toddler.

“C’mon, homecomer,” she says as she leads them through her apartment and into the bedroom. “You’ve been through a lot…let’s just sleep it off.”

“Can’t sleep it off,” Jake says, or maybe he only imagines he says it as Amy dumps him onto her comfy mattress with the comfy cotton duvet, and he flops to the side to make room for her. “Can’t sleep off…’leven months…”

“Yeah,” her voice rasps in his ear, and in the blurry, descending darkness, he feels her crawl up beside him, lay over his back with an arm around his waist, her breasts flattening against his shoulder blades and her teeth pressing gently into the nape of his neck. “But you can try.”

Then for a while there’s nothing.

It’s good sleep, the kind of sleep he hasn’t had in months. Usually he dreams about Brooklyn and Amy and his mom and Charles and Gina and being back in the thick of it as a cop and all the things that used to make him feel alive. But now that he’s home and Amy’s with him, he has no dreams. He just sleeps.

Then…then suddenly, it’s happening. The beautiful blankness stirs, like cloud cover being melted away by a beam of insistent sunlight, and Jake starts to have a dream. Not just any dream—an _awesome_ dream.

It starts as just a flicker of images and sensations: Amy’s skin, her smell, her tongue’s breathtaking combination of warm and wet. Slowly the individual pieces start to coalesce, and in the dream Jake is confused for a moment—is he back in Florida, is _Amy_ in Florida, where is he, what’s happening—but then it doesn’t matter, because Amy’s mouth is on him, working him, slick and blazing hot and teasing the way she always does with the tip of her tongue running up the underside of his shaft and then circling and suddenly being replaced by the gentlest press of teeth and then then then deep suction, hard suction, burning and tight and so smooth and in this dream Jake feels like he’s going to explode because she is so good, God _damn_.

He hasn’t dreamed like this in ages, not for months now, and it’s cruel but it’s also amazing, how real it feels, how his brain can recreate the specificity of her little hums and gasps, the way her lips pull back and squeeze around him, the pressure of her hands as they smooth over his legs and stomach and balls and ass and even in his mind she’s relentless, perfectly calculating, working him hard and hot but keep her touch just light enough that he can’t finish and he can’t finish and he can’t finish, no matter how hard he tries to pump up into her mouth she’s always moving back, he can never get enough _pressure_ or enough _heat_ or enough of _anything_ but there’s always just what’s needed to make sure that he’s going insane, he wants to come but no, what he really wants is for this to go on forever—

And that’s when Jake wakes up.

It’s not clear what wakes him: the sound of his own moaning, the overwhelming feeling of everything that’s happening, or even the way his head is rolling heavily back and forth on the pillow. For whatever reason, one second he’s asleep and the next he’s awake, and obviously this is no dream, this is Amy Santiago with her head between his legs, one hand steadily working his balls and upper thigh and the other threaded over his hip to grasp him at the base of his cock, her short black hair mussed, her eyes closed in intense concentration.

“Amy— _oh,”_ he chokes out, and something in his voice must have changed from the half-asleep noises he was making before, because her eyes suddenly pop open and then she’s pulling off of him with a slick sucking noise. The sight of her wet chin and red lips and the cool air on his tender skin nearly sends Jake over the edge right there. He spasms, gripping the sheets, hips jerking crazily back and forth against the mattress.

“Jake I’m sorry, I—do you want me to stop?” she whispers hoarsely. He struggles to find his voice again, frantically shaking his head.

“No—no— _please_ , fuck, please,” he babbles, and a slow smile spreads across her face as she slowly lower her head again and takes him in, slow but sucking so right, and his hand goes reflexively to the back of her head, scrabbling against her hair and pushing her weakly down towards him. She’s making eye contact without skipping a single beat, and Jake is breathless, his whole body is on fire and she’s got him helpless.

He’s never trusted anyone in his life more than he trusts her right now.

Slowly, she pulls off again, and Jake nearly cries. Her eyes are burning into his. He swallows and reaches for her, but she pushes his hand away and crawls forward, her breasts dangling. Jake closes his eyes for a second, takes a couple deep breaths, and recites the Miranda Rights in his head. He’s going to need all the self-control he can get.

She’s still wearing her fucking pants and underwear. As Jake lies back and watches, she positions herself above him on her hands and knees before shimmying out of both garments, shoving them off the bed without a second look. Unthinking, he reaches out again, and this time she doesn’t stop him. When his fingers brush the patch of dark hair between her legs, she shudders; when he pushes further and strokes inside, she lets out a high-pitched whimper. Jake, meanwhile, can barely breathe. She’s soaking wet, already rubbing herself against the backs of his knuckles. He presses his thumb against her clit and gives it an experimental flick; Amy cries out and clenches her legs tight around his hand, panting hard. _At least,_ he dimly realizes, _I’m not the only one who won’t last long._

Amy shuffles forward and rears up on her knees, the length of her body stretched above him. Her eyes are glittering, and the flush that spreads from her hips all the way up to her cheeks makes her look like she’s glowing. He reaches up and runs his hands over her breasts: they’re soft and heavy against his palms, the nipples firm but not hard. He squeezes once, massages the tender spots underneath with his thumbs. She sighs.

“Can I…” she asks, and the unfinished nature of the question just gives him time to scoot backwards and get himself better positioned, gripping himself with one hand and grasping her hip firmly with the other.

“I love you so much, Ames,” he breathes.

She nods. She sinks down slowly. Her eyes never leave his.

And then they’re together.

After the fact, Jake is incredibly proud of himself for not coming the actual second that Amy takes him inside. A year of no sex, let alone the mind-blowing foreplay of the last few minutes, has stripped him of all the stamina he has, and it would not have surprised him if the heat and the tightness and friction and the overwhelming _Amy-ness_ of it all were enough to send him smashing past all recognition.

But somehow, he does last a little longer, something like a minute or two, and it’s all right even so, because Amy is totally destroyed as well, and even as Jake is groaning and grunting and pumping upwards she’s grabbing his hand and curling it into a fist and jamming into the juncture between their bodies so that with every thrust his knuckles roll hard against her clit. He never saw anybody do that before her, it’s an essentially Amy sex-move, and everything about it—the sight of her riding him, the feel of her grinding up against his fingers, the way her head is thrown back in ecstasy and the rising volume of her moans as she undulates again and again—

He can’t take it. Jake feels the switch flip and he only has half a second to be both alarmed and impressed by the building intensity before his orgasm hits him, and then he’s gone, he’s over, he’s absolutely wrecked, he’s—he’s—he’s possibly blacking out for a moment or two, flickering in and out like an overloaded lightbulb before his body finally spends itself and he collapses back into the mattress.

But this day isn’t done being amazing, because through his thick and heavy daze he realized Amy is still going, she’s right on the edge, and then as he watches she seems to tighten up—her stomach, her shoulders, her legs, everything locks into place—and then she’s crying out, shouting his name, swearing, sobbing, riding furiously through the release as she folds forward and her hands dig into his chest and her legs squeeze him so hard he can feel his pelvis creak.

When Amy reaches the end of her rope, she flops on top of him, breathing hard. He misses her curtain of black hair, but he also loves the soft tickle of these short curls under his chin. Lying there, blissed out beyond words, he can’t imagine a better forever than this.

“Okay…”Amy pants. “Okay, now…now it feels…like you’re…really…home…”

“Oh fuck yeah,” Jake says weakly. He tries to hug her to him, but his arms don’t seem to work, so all he manages is to flop one sweaty arm around her back with a sound like a fish being thrown onto the sidewalk. “Yeah, that felt…really homey.”

“Good.” She shifts a little—Jake can feel himself slide out of her and he winces at the sudden change—and rolls slowly down his side until she’s cuddled in the crook of his arm. “I know stuff’s changed but whatever…whatever you need, I’m here.” Amy kisses his shoulder. “I’m here and we’re gonna do this together.”

“I know. Thanks, babe.” He yawns, sleep already setting in again. A thought wriggles through the impending stupor. “Hey Amy?”

“Mmmm?”

“I’m here for you too, ‘kay?”

“…thank you.” Her hand cups his face. “I love you.”

This time, when Jake sleeps, it’s not the good kind. It’s the great kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Review me please, so I can continue writing things that aren't sex (and some that are).

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews are like democracy: good and helpful and I want them.


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